Ramón Labañino spends his birthday in the “hole”

RAMÓN Labañino, one of the five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters imprisoned in the United States, celebrated his 47th birthday yesterday (June 9) but remained in an isolation cell where he has been confined since last April 27.

Labañino is currently being held in a punishment cell at the Kentucky maximum security penitentiary while awaiting his transfer to a medium security prison.

The change is a result of being re-sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment by the Federal Court of Miami last December, when a new sentence was also handed down to Fernando González (17 years and nine months).

Prior to that – in October 2009 – Antonio Guerrero had his sentence reduced to 21 years and 10 months.

During a brief interview with Prensa Latina, Labañino’s wife Elizabeth Palmeiro explained that her partner is currently “being held in isolation just as he was for the first 17 months after his arrest in 1998.”

This time “they have put him in the ‘hole’ claiming alleged security reasons surrounding him, given that he cannot be together with the rest of the prison population in a maximum security prison if he is now classed as “medium security”.

The issue is, she said, that while they are deciding on where he is to be relocated, “Ramón remains in the hole.”

Labañino, González, Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández and René González were arrested on September 12, 1998 in Miami and later subjected to a political trial that resulted in long and excessive sentences.

The Five, as the world knows them, infiltrated anti-Cuba terrorist organizations in Florida and their crime was to expose terrorist plots hatched against the Caribbean island from the United States.